Hunger-related deaths in Gaza set to soar, health official warns
Mohammed Zaqout, Gaza’s director of general hospitals, says at least 106 children are among 235 people who have died from hunger as the Israeli-induced famine continues.
Speaking to Al Jazeera Arabic, Zaqout urged the international community to intervene to allow the entry of much-needed aid into the besieged enclave before death as a result of malnutrition spreads into most communities in Gaza.
“These cases will soon be in the thousands, if nothing changes,” Zaqout said.
“Children are among the weakest and most vulnerable to malnutrition,” he said. “We have no treatments to save them, not even intravenous feeding, which is used in emergency cases like those we are seeing now.”
Health official warns 55,000 pregnant women in Gaza suffering from malnutrition
The director of al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza has told Al Jazeera Arabic that 55,000 pregnant women in the enclave are now suffering from malnutrition, as he warned of several spiralling health crises in the Strip.
He said the hospital is unable to provide services due to the total collapse of the health system, and that three children with paralysis are at risk of dying. With no safe drinking water in Gaza City, cases of gastroenteritis are also rising, and there is nothing available for heart patients in the enclave, he added.
UN experts say Israel committing ‘medicide’ through attacks on Gaza’s healthcare system
The targeted destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system by the Israeli military amounts to “medicide”, a group of UN experts has said, accusing Israel of deliberately attacking and starving healthcare workers, paramedics and hospitals to wipe out medical care in the besieged enclave.
“As human beings and UN experts, we cannot remain silent about the war crimes committed before our eyes in Gaza,” said Tlaleng Mofokeng, special rapporteur on the right to health and Francesca Albanese, special rapporteur on occupied Palestinian territory.
“In addition to bearing witness to an ongoing genocide we are also bearing witness to a ‘medicide’, a sinister component of the intentional creation of conditions calculated to destroy Palestinians in Gaza which constitutes an act of genocide,” the experts said.
“Health and care workers have been continuously targeted, detained, tortured and are now, like the rest of the population, being starved,” they said.
